16/12/15. It seems to me in retrospect that every one of the fifteen chapters I have written of George Calderon’s biography is perilously different in length, form and style; but none is so different as the one I am writing at the moment — the last one of the book. It is the story of Kittie’s last twenty-eight years and George’s posthumous literary life, yet it will be the shortest (about 3000 words). The ‘deep chronology’ that I spent two months constructing proved only the beginning. I realise now that I have to evoke not only the key events in Kittie’s life 1922-50, but the ‘feel’ of her life through those years. I have, in fact, to evoke how it felt to be Kittie. Quite, quite different from the other chapters. And, I have to admit, a tall order. But that’s enough of a ‘spoiler’…
* * *
Cambridge Professor of International History David Reynolds’s lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’, was a virtuoso performance — restrained, relaxed, magisterial, deeply challenging. The audience of about a hundred and fifty gave him a long ovation.
Many of Reynolds’s points are made in his recent book (and TV series) The Long Shadow, which I was familiar with, but I was surprised to find myself taking three pages of notes. If I were to summarise and quote from the whole lecture it would take thousands of words. Personally, I hope the lecture is published in some form, as it is surely something of an historic turning-point itself in how we think of the First World War.
Reynolds is ‘not sure that the way we remember the War is conducive to making our peace with the War’. Poets like Owen and Sassoon are our ‘supreme interpreters of the War’, and he implied that they won’t lie down… There has been a revival in Remembrance Sunday and the two-minute silence. Our difficulty in making our peace with WW1 can be traced to disillusion after 1918 with the idea that it had been ‘the war to end all wars’ and therefore justified. We are troubled by the fact that it did not solve the ‘German Problem’, and the biggest loss of life in British military history was therefore wasted. Reynolds quoted Hannah Arendt to the effect that the great problem after WW1 was ‘coming to terms with sudden, random death’. He gave a harrowing example of this from Vera Brittain and could only compare it today with the devastating emotional impact of road deaths. He described his experience of the charity Road Peace, whose own act of remembrance is held the week after Armistice Day, and drew parallels between national attitudes to WW1 and grieving. By contrast, we have made our peace with the Second World War because it ‘ended by revealing the morality of the War…it was our Finest Hour’.
A particularly interesting section of Reynolds’s lecture was where he compared attitudes to both wars in the rest of Europe. The French have no difficulty with WW1 because it was a ‘war of national liberation that they won’, whereas WW2 was a disaster for them (‘capitulation and collaboration’) that traumatised French society. But, like the Germans themselves, they have been able to view both wars as a single agony that was laid to rest in 1945 — and even more so by the Treaty of Rome (founding the EU), which Reynolds described as ‘the Peace Treaty that didn’t happen after 1918’. The French and Germans have, Reynolds claimed, ‘moved on’ because they accept a common European destiny, whereas we have difficulty believing we ‘belong’ to Europe and our ancillary role in WW1 itself questions the fact.
Reynolds’s peroration was that ‘we need to remember but also understand’. We are now as far away from the Great War as its participants were from Waterloo (it amused me slightly that he seemed to be suggesting that Waterloo no longer meant anything to WW1 soldiers, when we know from George Calderon’s letters that even as the Orsova was taking him and fellow-officers to Gallipoli they were planning a celebration of it!). ‘We need to remember the men who marched away’, Reynolds concluded, but also:
- ‘Clamber out of the Trenches’
- ‘Escape from Poets Corner’
- ‘Understand the Great War as history’
The latter, of course, is what you would expect an historian to say, but Reynolds meant specifically to understand it as a global war, as one that ‘reshapes the Middle East, and involved China and Japan’.
There was a fascinating range of questions afterwards, both from the audience and from Reynolds to the audience, but the very first participant asked forcefully ‘when?’ would we make our peace with WW1; he felt it would take ‘a long time’ because at the moment we plainly did not want to. At this point, I felt, Reynolds’s own attitude revealed itself as more nuanced. ‘I want to continue remembering these people’, he said, meaning the names all over our war memorials and Thiepval’s arches, and implied that he approved of the public acts of remembrance. But he also added, in a phrase that deeply struck home with me at least, that ‘we have to start letting go of the dead’.
Related
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Captain of the 11
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George Calderon, 1912
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Watch this Space
16/12/15. It seems to me in retrospect that every one of the fifteen chapters I have written of George Calderon’s biography is perilously different in length, form and style; but none is so different as the one I am writing at the moment — the last one of the book. It is the story of Kittie’s last twenty-eight years and George’s posthumous literary life, yet it will be the shortest (about 3000 words). The ‘deep chronology’ that I spent two months constructing proved only the beginning. I realise now that I have to evoke not only the key events in Kittie’s life 1922-50, but the ‘feel’ of her life through those years. I have, in fact, to evoke how it felt to be Kittie. Quite, quite different from the other chapters. And, I have to admit, a tall order. But that’s enough of a ‘spoiler’…
* * *
Cambridge Professor of International History David Reynolds’s lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’, was a virtuoso performance — restrained, relaxed, magisterial, deeply challenging. The audience of about a hundred and fifty gave him a long ovation.
Many of Reynolds’s points are made in his recent book (and TV series) The Long Shadow, which I was familiar with, but I was surprised to find myself taking three pages of notes. If I were to summarise and quote from the whole lecture it would take thousands of words. Personally, I hope the lecture is published in some form, as it is surely something of an historic turning-point itself in how we think of the First World War.
Reynolds is ‘not sure that the way we remember the War is conducive to making our peace with the War’. Poets like Owen and Sassoon are our ‘supreme interpreters of the War’, and he implied that they won’t lie down… There has been a revival in Remembrance Sunday and the two-minute silence. Our difficulty in making our peace with WW1 can be traced to disillusion after 1918 with the idea that it had been ‘the war to end all wars’ and therefore justified. We are troubled by the fact that it did not solve the ‘German Problem’, and the biggest loss of life in British military history was therefore wasted. Reynolds quoted Hannah Arendt to the effect that the great problem after WW1 was ‘coming to terms with sudden, random death’. He gave a harrowing example of this from Vera Brittain and could only compare it today with the devastating emotional impact of road deaths. He described his experience of the charity Road Peace, whose own act of remembrance is held the week after Armistice Day, and drew parallels between national attitudes to WW1 and grieving. By contrast, we have made our peace with the Second World War because it ‘ended by revealing the morality of the War…it was our Finest Hour’.
A particularly interesting section of Reynolds’s lecture was where he compared attitudes to both wars in the rest of Europe. The French have no difficulty with WW1 because it was a ‘war of national liberation that they won’, whereas WW2 was a disaster for them (‘capitulation and collaboration’) that traumatised French society. But, like the Germans themselves, they have been able to view both wars as a single agony that was laid to rest in 1945 — and even more so by the Treaty of Rome (founding the EU), which Reynolds described as ‘the Peace Treaty that didn’t happen after 1918’. The French and Germans have, Reynolds claimed, ‘moved on’ because they accept a common European destiny, whereas we have difficulty believing we ‘belong’ to Europe and our ancillary role in WW1 itself questions the fact.
Reynolds’s peroration was that ‘we need to remember but also understand’. We are now as far away from the Great War as its participants were from Waterloo (it amused me slightly that he seemed to be suggesting that Waterloo no longer meant anything to WW1 soldiers, when we know from George Calderon’s letters that even as the Orsova was taking him and fellow-officers to Gallipoli they were planning a celebration of it!). ‘We need to remember the men who marched away’, Reynolds concluded, but also:
The latter, of course, is what you would expect an historian to say, but Reynolds meant specifically to understand it as a global war, as one that ‘reshapes the Middle East, and involved China and Japan’.
There was a fascinating range of questions afterwards, both from the audience and from Reynolds to the audience, but the very first participant asked forcefully ‘when?’ would we make our peace with WW1; he felt it would take ‘a long time’ because at the moment we plainly did not want to. At this point, I felt, Reynolds’s own attitude revealed itself as more nuanced. ‘I want to continue remembering these people’, he said, meaning the names all over our war memorials and Thiepval’s arches, and implied that he approved of the public acts of remembrance. But he also added, in a phrase that deeply struck home with me at least, that ‘we have to start letting go of the dead’.
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